<sub>The material is the starting point.
Parts of different colors and shapes,
stacked next to each other,
tell the stories.

I start to build on something.

Piece by piece,
block by block,
one on top of the other,
slowly from the ground up.

Like an unstable but growing structure,
with the naive conviction that something
will hold up in the end.
Always on the lookout for signs.</sub>

“On the Lookout for Signs” unfolds through a series of sculptures aiming to investigate and embrace the ethos of becoming a bricoleur. The artist employs practices of scavenging and discovering, closely connected with bric-a-brac and other DIY practices, for the collection of materials—spolia, sourced from demo lition sites all around the city. The classical definition of spolia relates to material culture in the sense of frag ments defined as parts. When people seek to build something new, they require materials. Unused, abandoned, damaged, or unwanted older structures become quarries, providing raw materials. Spolia encapsulates ideas and traces from the past, and reuse is considered a sustainable practice that rejuvenates old frag ments, enriching our understanding of history. Departing from traditional construction methodologies, this body of work ap proaches unconventional combinations of disparate building materials. In this context, the artist weaves a narrative by incorporating a tinkering logic allowing spolia to act upon her thinking and action. The creative process hinges on tech nical mistakes, with the artist allowing errors to guide novel solutions through an improvisatory and spontaneous activity. These sculptural compositions serve as poetic reflections on themes rooted in vernacular and anonymous art and archi tecture, where the architect is absent. “The white cubical house, the vernacular architecture in the Aegean archipelago, knows no author.” The pieces are not a single body , but consist of independent pieces. Thus changing the order the art ist allows the material itself to take the burden of decision making, reflecting on the un-self conscious work of the untrained builders.

_{images & texts - Chryssa Kotoula |}